Microsoft’s Office Labs experiments with OneNote

Move a slider to highlight pages modified during a certain time period.

Discard the notion that working with documents, at least in Microsoft’s OneNote software, requires looking at them, for the most part, page by page.

A prototype unveiled Friday lets users see thumbnails of all the pages they have created within the organizing and note-taking program on one screen.

Zoom in with your mouse (or your finger, if you have a touch screen) to see a page close up. Double click or touch it in order to open up OneNote and edit it.

Want to return to a page later? Make the thumbnail bigger so that you remember to come back. Want to look at all the pages modified within a certain time period? Move a slider to the left or right and see the pages highlighted.

The prototype, called Canvas for OneNote, is the latest creation of Microsoft’s 65-person Office Labs, which is tasked in part with helping the Office team innovate.

(Some Office Labs work will be highlighted Friday by Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop during a morning address at the Wharton Business Technology Conference in Philadelphia).

If Canvas for OneNote proves used and useful, similar canvases could be incorporated in future versions of OneNote and also potentially other Office programs.

“We run a lot of experiments,” said Office Labs General Manager Chris Pratley, a 15-year Microsoft veteran. “What if all your stuff was like this? An infinite desktop of real stuff.”

It makes sense to try out the technology with OneNote, Pratley said, because OneNote users typically have “lots of pages of stuff.”

“What if I could spread the pages out?” he said.

Pratley, who played important roles in the development of various versions of Word and helped create OneNote, has run Office Labs since its inception two years ago.

“I have a reputation as a guy who can make neat things that don’t suck,” he said in an interview earlier this week.

Pratley said that his team, which includes several cultural anthropologists, continuously tries to predict where technology trends are going.

(They don’t just sit around and brainstorm. Instead, they look at usage data and query experts. Next week, for instance, the team is sponsoring a Microsoft symposium on Chinese mobile users to learn more about them).

With Canvas for OneNote, Pratley said, Microsoft is looking at more “natural ways” of interacting with software.

The application is up for download on the Office Labs Web site, officelabs.com.

“We want to see how people really use it,” he said.

So, like the other prototypes on the site, OneNote for Canvas is for now more science experiment than add-on.

It joins a lineup of Office Labs prototypes that includes an e-mail prioritizer for Outlook that automatically prioritizes e-mail for you based on information about the e-mail (Pratley says that 50 percent of the people downloading the plug-in are actually receiving “placebo” versions, although the description doesn’t make that evident) and pptPlex which transforms PowerPoint presentations into a zoomable canvas, somewhat like the new Canvas for OneNote.